Students’ emotion classification system through an ensemble approach

Abstract

Emotion is a psychological and physiological response to an event or stimulus. Understanding students' emotions helps teachers and educators interact more effectively with students and create a better learning environment. The importance of understanding students' emotions in the learning process has led to exploring the use of facial emotion classification technology. In this research, an ensemble approach consisting of ResNet, MobileNet, and Inception is applied to identify emotional expressions on the faces of school students using a dataset that includes emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, and boredom, acquired from students of Darul Imarah State Junior High School, Great Aceh District, Indonesia. Our dataset is available publicly, and so-called USK-FEMO. The performance evaluation results show that each model and approach has significant capabilities in classifying facial emotions. The ResNet model shows the best performance with the highest accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, which is 86%. MobileNet and Inception also demonstrate good performance, indicating potential in handling complex expression variations. The most interesting finding is that the ensemble approach achieves the highest accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of 90%. By combining predictions from the three models, the ensemble approach can consistently and accurately address emotion variations. Implementing emotion classification models, individually and in an ensemble format, can improve teacher-student interactions and optimize learning strategies that are responsive to students' emotional needs.